Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

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Corrupting the Boy Scouts

A high-profile member of the Boy Scouts of America's governing board says he doesn't support the Scouts' policy of excluding gays and will work from within to seek a change.
Ernst & Young CEO James Turley, whose accounting firm has welcomed gays and lesbians in its own work force, becomes the first member of the Scouts' Executive Board known to publicly disapprove of the policy.
"I support the meaningful work of the Boy Scouts in preparing young people for adventure, leadership, learning and service, however the membership policy is not one I would personally endorse," Turley said in a statement released by his company.
"As I have done in leading Ernst & Young to being a most inclusive organization, I intend to continue to work from within the BSA Board to actively encourage dialogue and sustainable progress," Turley said.

I'm quite sure that most of you are as sick and tired of this subject as I am. I don't even want to type the loathesome words anymore. We didn't choose this fight, but we have to fight it anyway. Better to be conquered by a foreign army than to perish this way.

This is just the latest development. First, a lesbian Scout leader was ousted back in April. Then the protests came, and the publicity, and a signed petition. Last month an internal resolution was submitted forcing the BSA to review its policy. Now we have this high-powered board member "coming out", as it were, and calling on another board member (an AT&T executive) to do the same, which I'm sure will happen promptly. It's all very predictable and I expect there to be a schism in the BSA before years' end.

Lydia, that about sums it up. Organizations like this can really get wrapped up in image, influence, presitge and money. It's a constant temptation for them, along with a fear of social marginalization. Without broad-based support in the culture and society - and without a coherent religious foundation - the BSA is going to find defending its policy very difficult, if not impossible.

OK, but is there any (even remote) prospect of other board members saying "well, you want something that is contrary to the nature of the organization, so goodbye, and don't let the door hit you on the way out."? Or, "You're free to start an organization like that, it just isn't THIS organization. If gays have a right to be gay, then straights have a right to be straight, and the freedom to associate with others as they choose. This is what they have chosen." I mean, board members can be deposed. Their boardship isn't written in stone.

I don't think it will happen, but it might be nice to at least take a stab at it, and have some fun saying what you really mean.

Jeff, I don't know. Consider all the money they spent in legal costs already defending this policy. Gotta be _large_ sums of money. That indicates quite a bit of determination. Surely the pressure to drop the policy was bigger then in some ways.

"As I have done in leading Ernst & Young to being a most inclusive organization, I intend to continue to work from within the BSA Board to actively encourage dialogue and sustainable progress," Turley said.

When you see a statement like this you can be assured that dialogue is going to be one-way and the direction of "progress" has already be predetermined.

I thought there already exists a Man-Boy Love Association. Maybe MBLA is not as pretty an acronym as BSA for these folks. They will persist in trying to adorn themselves and their favored perversions with the pelts of any and every good organization they can get their hands upon to skin.

Hopefully, other BSA Board members with spines will stand up against this. Else, the BSA will slide down the same road the GSA has been on for several years now, to the detriment of the kids for whom the organizations have always existed in the first place.

WWWW correspondents may be astonished to learn that the Scout Association in the UK positively welcomes homosexuals.

Here's a few extracts from its policy document, Being Gay with an Adult Role in Scouting:

It's OK to be an adult in Scouting and be gay!

A leader’s sexual orientation has no bearing on their (sic) suitability to fulfil a role in Scouting.

There is no link between homosexuality and paedophilia, and therefore there is no justification for restricting Membership on this basis.

There is no basis on which any volunteer offering his or her services in any capacity can be refused an appointment in, or membership of, the Movement on the grounds of heterosexual or homosexual orientation.

Note the cunning reference to being refused an appointment in the Scouts on grounds of 'heterosexual orientation': as if this could or ever has happened. An assumption of moral equivalence appears in the hypocrisy of the declaration.

Arguable, to say the least. What's not arguable is that there IS a link the size of the freakin' moon between homosexuality and ephebophilia.

Just looked up ephebophilia: the difference between that and paedophilia being, I now understand, the arrival of puberty. Does the puberty of the victim make a difference in the moral gravity of the vice we're talking about?

We have our two oldest boys in BSA but I have mixed feelings about the organization. There’s the incoherent view on religion from their founding and they now have Muslim achievements, Hindu achievements, etc. In general, the families in our troop are secular-minded and non-church-attending. Many troops are sponsored by fairly liberal churches e.g. United Methodist churches.

A Roman Catholic friend told me that when he was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, Catholics had to get permission from their Bishop to join scouts and the Bishops often didn’t give it. I know of Lutheran Churches that do not approve of their members participating since BSA teaches good works independent of Christ.

We have our boys in it because it’s just about their only social outlet. They’re homeschooled and there’s nothing but old people at our church.

"Does the puberty of the victim make a difference in the moral gravity of the vice we're talking about?"

Not at all. It's a rhetorical trick used by the pro-gay crowd to deflect attention from the obvious connection between ephebophilia and homosexuality. Technically speaking, pedophilia and ephebophilia aren't the same thing, but most people lump them together under the "pedophilia" heading. Therefore when the pro-gay crowd says "there's no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia" they are only (arguably) correct if the term "pedophilia" is used in the strict sense which most people don't know.

Perhaps there's no connection between homosexuality and a man liking 8 y.o. boys. But you'd have to be a complete moron to believe that there's none between it and a man liking 14 y.o. boys.

OK, but is there any (even remote) prospect of other board members saying "well, you want something that is contrary to the nature of the organization, so goodbye, and don't let the door hit you on the way out."?

...I mean, board members can be deposed. Their boardship isn't written in stone.

Hopefully that's exactly what will happen, but I'm not holding my breath. It's probably more a function of how much money and influence AT&T and other corporate supporters bring to the Scouts.

Jeff, I don't know. Consider all the money they spent in legal costs already defending this policy. Gotta be _large_ sums of money. That indicates quite a bit of determination. Surely the pressure to drop the policy was bigger then in some ways.

I think the pressure on the BSA will be far greater today than it was back in 2000. There's been a lot of water under the bridge in the past 12 years. 12 years ago the majority of the American population still supported BSA policy: I seriously doubt that is true anymore. Even the traditional demographic base of the Scouts - "heartland America", if you will - has lost its backbone on this.

A Roman Catholic friend told me that when he was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, Catholics had to get permission from their Bishop to join scouts and the Bishops often didn’t give it. I know of Lutheran Churches that do not approve of their members participating since BSA teaches good works independent of Christ.

We have our boys in it because it’s just about their only social outlet. They’re homeschooled and there’s nothing but old people at our church.

I have one of my boys in scouting for the same reason. We have a pretty conservative troop really focused on the outings and skills, with good leadership, and the experience has been good for him thus far. The LCMS and WELS used to have their own scouting organizations due to their objections to mainstream scouting, which they identified as fundamentally masonic. There is also a Catholic scouting movement called the Federation of North American Explorers, which looks very promising: http://www.fneexplorers.com/

In my opinion, the pedophilia connection is by no means the only reason for this policy. If we are reasonable people, we would not send perfectly healthy, normal adult women to be supervisors on camping trips with boys--either young boys or teenagers. There is a reason why, when I worked at camp as a young person, the camp counselors in the boys' cabins were male and in the girls' cabins were female. Not because we thought there was any inclination for women to be interested in 8-year-old boys or even any serious danger of their seducing 14-year-old boys (though the latter, sad to say, has happened in some public high schools more recently), but because the boys had a right to their physical privacy in live-in situations. And physical privacy has to do with being with members of one's own gender who have no interest in any one of any age of one's own gender. Period. Boys and girls in camp/camping/dormitory situations should be able to shower, dress, undress, sleep, etc., in a context that does not have the remotest connection to sex among those in the live-in situation. And if the counselors or fellow campers are interested in "people like you" *even if they are older people* that asexual context is not maintained.

These things should be pretty obvious, but nowadays they apparently need to be said.

See how he framed it as "progress?"
No, it is destruction of normal non-sexual male bonding and solidarity.
This sickness needs to be stopped.
One generation ago sodomists were considered mentally ill and not allowed into the country,and prosecuted for sexual deviancy.
What the gays do in private with consenting adults is one thing,usurping and taking advantage of pubescent boys sexual development in another.
Make no mistake-this is an attack on hetero-normative.
(At the roots,where it is most vulnerable.)
Real men protect boys from sodomites.

Sounds like a schism...
I never really understood how the BSA could be a-confessional--how does a Catholic have mass during a weeklong campout? A protestant his Sunday service?
For another European comparison, in France there are three major scouting organizations, all Catholic: one a more progressive sort, with mixed-sex troops (absurd, I realize) and the two others much more traditional and very religious. All are associated with a parish, Catholic school, monastery, etc.., and hence a priest. Then there are a number of other, much smaller organizations, one muslim, one protestant, one Jewish, one anti-clerical, and quite a few trad Catholics.
However, even though France is much less religious than the US, the traditional, Catholic groups are still much, much more successful than the lay, anti-secularist group, and even more successful than the progressive group (which, aside from mixity, is really not that progressive, and limited in its progressiveness by its association with the RCC). So I would think that a split in the BSA would advantage the more conservative side, no?

I never really understood how the BSA could be a-confessional--how does a Catholic have mass during a weeklong campout? A protestant his Sunday service?

Catholic BSA troops sometimes have a priest-chaplain along. Our troop isn't Catholic, but my son is usually back from his weekend trips before the 1:00pm TLM on Sunday. When he isn't, he has a verbal "dispensation" from a priest to substitute a rosary or some other devotion.

I never really understood how the BSA could be a-confessional--how does a Catholic have mass during a weeklong campout? A protestant his Sunday service?

I never understood why it would pose a difficult problem to begin with. My kids are in Civil Air Patrol, which is not denominational (and, as an auxiliary of the Air Force, isn't much for religious sentiment anyway). Still and all, at all of their functions which they expect to run all day through Sunday, they plan for the Catholic kids going off to Mass: typically, at least one of the chaperones is Catholic too, and they just send all the Catholic kids off in a van with that chaperone to a local Mass. At the annual Virginia "Encampment" (which is basically boot camp, toned down slightly for high school kids), they usually have over 100 kids attend, and usually around 25 to 30 Catholics, so they just import a priest to say Mass. In the rare events that run through Sunday morning but not Sunday evening, we just plan to pick the kids up and take them to Sunday evening Mass.

All it takes is a little flexibility and foresight for the organization to accommodate Catholics, Mormons, and others. It just isn't that hard.

If it was a heterosexual man coaching teenage girls feminists would go ballistic about 'sexual harassment' and "rape" charges (not to mention how the relationship was a power struggle, hateful, regressive, outdated and discrimination). These double standards are disturbing and illogical.

Uh, Cynthia, a "a heterosexual man coaching teenage girls" just won the local high school a state basketball championship. People are fine with it, and a school in our conference just hired an alumna (with very strong athletic credentials; she can probably beat all her boys in one-on-one) to coach the boys BB team. They use separate locker rooms. That does create a supervision problem, in that you don't have an adult figure in the locker room to prevent players from harassing each other; but I'm here to tell you that having that adult presence didn't stop it when I was a boy, either.

I'm a Scout leader myself. I agree with BSA policy because boys already have a dearth of masculine role models, but Sanduskies have been grooming Scouts -- very rarely, but still too often -- for probably almost as long as the BSA has existed. BSA already has a "two-deep leadership" requirement to prevent any suggestion of sexual imposition, and boys' changing rooms are not only segregated from adults but from boys of different ages.

That does create a supervision problem, in that you don't have an adult figure in the locker room to prevent players from harassing each other; but I'm here to tell you that having that adult presence didn't stop it when I was a boy, either.

It should have. If it didn't, what was needed was a beefing up of the adult presence and authority, not throwing up our hands, shrugging our shoulders, and leaving the kids to their own devices in the locker room. Sorry, but not having an adult in the locker room is a problem. No doubt, however, that problem has been de-emphasized because God forbid we should think that it would be better to have men coaching boys' teams.

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